


Lucid Dreaming

by subducting



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:55:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25830031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subducting/pseuds/subducting
Summary: The Doctor falls asleep and dreams of her friends. Even in her sleep, she can't stop being haunted by the unanswered questions she's left them with.For the DW creators style swap, written in the style of FictionPenned
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10
Collections: DW Creators Writing Style Swap





	Lucid Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FictionPenned](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/gifts).



The Doctor shivers and breathes out pain.

Breathes in loneliness that rises like a tide into a chest filled with coastal caves, each new rush of ocean water scraping the sides with sand and salt, scooping out rock and driving the cliff face closer to collapse. The rushing saltwater churns frantically around the base of ancient sea stacks of thoughts, smoothing down dark, slick rock that has never known dryness or warmth.

Breathes out stubbornness and pride. It’s no use now, encased in a cold tomb, numb fingers worked into the depths of her pockets, grasping in the darkness for anything and meeting only vast emptiness. The deep, deep quiet of space is calling out for her, lurking just outside the cell. It would take nothing at all to rip a hole in the hull and suck her into the empty blackness, and she already knows how it would feel.

Brief moments of exposure to the uncaring vacuum of space are some of this body’s earliest memories. She had bathed in the void, a baptism of purest ice, hair fluttering just slightly as the vast darkness plunged her systems into slow motion. The numbing cold and heady rush of asphyxiation had almost been tranquil in their slowness as she and her newfound friends had teetered on the edge of oblivion, lungs empty and eyes filled with stars.

It is not a good memory to revisit now.

She turns her shoulder to the uncaring metal wall, which presses indifferently through her thin coat. She’s never more exposed than she is without her smile, and in its absence she curls deeper into the pale fabric, a fragile barrier against the worst the silence has to offer.

Her fingertips turn blue, and she rubs them together, managing to rouse a faint little pink flush under her nails that drains away as soon as the pressure is gone. Thermodynamics works against her as thermal radiation wisps away from the hull of the prison, grains in an hourglass that she’s trapped in, sinking inevitably towards the centre.

There isn’t anyone left for her to fool, so she’s reduced to trying, pitifully, to fool herself. Trying to believe that she shouldn’t be here, sinking to her knees in guilt so familiar it has its own voice.

“I can’t believe you just left us,” a familiar voice lets her know she’s dreaming. Where else would she hear such a comforting, haunting sound?

She’s lent a little too much into self pity and slid into something else altogether.

The Doctor is still crumpled on her side, a strewn piece of litter on the floor of the TARDIS like plastic bags that jerk fitfully through Sheffield streets. And Yaz is towering over her, eyes blazing with fury, arms crossed. Everything in her posture is closed, slammed shut.

“I had to,” she replies, bemused. Of all the things to be furious at her, Yaz has chosen an odd one. The Doctor struggles to her feet and frowns, trying to get her bearings. She turns her eyes on Yaz, shuttering her own emotions ineffectually. The grate gets stuck halfway down and wont budge, and below it loneliness and despair start shoving their way out.

“You shouldn’t have made us leave you,” Yaz accuses her, those huge eyes screaming bloody murder at the Doctor. They can hold a lot, Yaz’s eyes- smiles that pinch their corners and turn them liquid and warm, indignation and righteousness as she leads the charge, tears and an ocean of hurt that roils and bellows for relief.

Betrayal, as she stares the Doctor down in her dream. The Doctor lowers her shoulders, angles her chin arrogantly. Yaz isn’t really here. Yaz is safe, home on Earth, thanks to the Doctor.

“What was my alternative then?” her words are sharp, precise, “Let you die with me?” This version of the Doctor doesn’t mince words, barely holds back. Yaz doesn’t flinch.

“We would have. You shouldn’t have died alone.”

“Well, I didn’t,” she snaps. Another miraculous escape, another surrender she doesn’t have to contemplate the consequences of. No matter how many times she lays her head on the chopping block, she always seems to manage to slip away at the last second- clemency, she wonders, or drawn out torture?

Tears bud at the corner of Yaz’s eyes, and before the Doctor knows it a garden of misery blooms across the young woman’s face, and all her venom evaporates. She rushes forwards, hands outstretched, and hesitantly runs a thumb across Yaz’s cheek, catching the tears.

  
“Hey now, Yaz, no sense dying over silly old me. And I’m certainly not worth crying over!”

Yaz raises a hand to grasp the Doctor’s, expression trembling. The Doctor knows that look, recognises it, and it scares her. Bone-deep devotion, written into every fibre of Yaz’s being, burnt indelibly into her. It’s the look of moments before disaster, of someone getting hurt for the Doctor. It’s Rose refusing to accept she was gone and almost burning up to save her. It’s Sarah Jane, left behind and left half empty for decades on end. It’s Bill, trusting and believing, right up until the very end, never quite accepting that the Doctor had let her down.

Yaz’s lip is wobbling, but she’s still trying to hold her expression together. She stubbornly grits her teeth and shakes her head, maintaining her fury with the Doctor even as she clings to her hand, long fingers shaking.

Slowly, Yaz uncurls the Doctor’s fingers from her cheek and lowers their hands, using the Doctor’s lowered guard to pull the timelord into a bone-crushing hug. She swears she’ll wake up with cracked ribs, even though this is a dream- Yaz’s breaths against her chest go straight through her hearts, sunlight on water.

“Do you have any idea how much you mean to us, Doctor? How much you mean to me? How could you leave us? How could you just  _ die _ ?”

Yaz’s steely pride and determined composure all unravel at once, and her voice is so raw it drags ragged injures across the Doctor’s chest. Soon she’ll be nothing but holes, with nothing solid left to hold her together. She’s already close, a chest once filled with pride and fire and triumph and despair now just a hollow shell of sinew and secrets and bone.

“I didn’t die,” she tries to reassure Yaz, but her voice turns to morning mist in her lungs as she speaks and she doesn’t think the young woman hears. Cold, which she’d forgotten in it’s absence, intrudes her senses once again and she wakes once again to frozen floors and darkness.

“I didn’t die,” she repeats to the empty cell, pressing her fingertips inside her coat in a bid to get them to come back to life.

***

Days inch on, the rock face of the Doctor’s existence eroding one slow and painful grain at a time. Stubborn little seconds stick under her nails and crunch in her teeth, and she clings to the disintegrating cliff by her fingertips. Time looks monolithic from afar, a solid mass of stone, unyielding and vast, but as she’s forced to watch it pass by in a straight line, the individual particles that make up the whole slip through her fingers and she feels every one of them, the amassed collection of the seconds that came before piling behind her like a vast dune. Her history could drown a city in a desert of arid spent moments, all now behind her, leaving the once fertile plain of her possibility a parched, desperate empty land.

In the isolation and dark and quiet she sees her history unspool and run backwards, a tenuous path connecting her through so many lifetimes to the very beginning, the first betrayal, all those thousands of years ago. The weight of the years crashes down on her shoulders, the endless chaos of her existence invading her lifetime. It’s little wonder she’s so good at separating each different face into a different person. Leather and rage to pinstripes and grins to bow ties and arrogance, to gray hair and defeat, the Doctor discards her previous faces and lives as easily as the outfits that go with them, a habit she’s been trained into since before she can remember, quite literally. The impossibility of connecting the thousands of collected years of experience that make up just the fraction of her life she remembers is what drives her to isolate them, cutting them loose and casting them aside like ribbons in the cosmic wind, trailing and fluttering away as soon as she stops holding on at all.

She is the ship of Theseus, remade so many times with and without her consent, and looking at her hands now in the darkness and cold, she wonders how she can possibly still be the same person as before. A man is the sum of his memories, and a timelord even more so. What does that make her, if many of her memories are missing? Not a timelord, not as she had been told. Not from Gallifrey, not originally.

“What is it that they’re hiding?” she wonders aloud.

“Why are you so desperate to know?” asks a familiar voice.

The Doctor blinks and glances up in mild surprise. Asleep again, she surmises, watching Ryan watching her from the warehouse in Sheffield. Wan Earth light is cascading through the wide open doors and she squints, unused to the light and warmth. She stands, staggering, and walks to the doorway, inhaling a deep breath.

“Wouldn’t you be,” she replies finally, glancing at Ryan, who has joined her in the sun. He lifts his eyebrows as if surprised she’s speaking so candidly.

  
“It’s only a dream, Ryan,” she explains, “No harm in talking to a dream.”

“I remember kids in school saying if you spoke in a dream, it was bad luck,” he says, blinking as he glances from her face to the sky, “It looks pretty real to me. But you’re here, so it must be.”

His expression is twisted with pain and resignation, a well worn grief. He’s dealt with it before, she knows- he bears it better than Graham, better than she does. The youngest by far, and yet he’s already as familiar with loss as she is. It shrouds him like a dark cloud that clings to his shoulders and drags at the lines in his face.

“I’m sorry to have left you,” she sighs, an apologetic grimace leaping automatically onto her expression, “But it was going to happen eventually sooner or later.”

“Does that make it any better,” he scowls down at her, shaking his head, “Why’d you let us get so close to you, if you were just gonna leave us when you needed us the most?”

“You lot dying for me is the absolute last thing I’ll ever need,” she replies hotly, rounding on him, “Do you ever think of that, when you’re all charging into danger? Don’t you ever wonder? You ask so many questions but you don’t ask the right questions, not for yourselves.”

“What question should I be askin’ then, Doctor?” he’s nettled, scowling, but he doesn’t match her tone, and she feels guilty. Sharpening her teeth on the fam has become one of her bad habits, another sin to add to her never ending pile.

  
“Why was I alone when we first met? Why don’t I have a family? Why don’t I want you to know all the answers to your questions?”

Ryan only stares at her, eyes blazing with hurt and confusion. She can’t blame him, but she can’t stop the hurtful words that have piled up in her mind from spilling over into the dream, colouring the bright air with the tinge of bitterness.

“You’re not a bad person, Doctor,” Ryan says slowly, haltingly, as he navigates the implications of her statements, “Whatever happened to you in the past, you should know by now, we’re only judging you for what you do, not what you’ve done.”

She wants to let him talk her down, wants to fold into a hug she’s sure will be comforting and safe. Wants to let him believe that she really is as good as she tries to be for them, that her crimes and awful, bloodied history deserve forgiveness. But he doesn’t see, she’s kept him so well in the dark. All of them are spared the brutal history of her lives. Another deception, a lie, a further sin to her ledger.

“You have no idea what I’ve done,” she sighs, and the Sheffield sunlight shimmers and ripples like a curtain of water. The Doctor reaches for it, but her fingers scatter the scene instead of capturing it, and it cascades into a thousand imperfect droplets. When she starts awake, the fragments of the warm sunny day are as unreachable as the stars out of the window of her cell.

***

Sometimes she wonders if she’s in purgatory.

Her dreams seem pretty insistent she’s died, and Yaz and Ryan’s haunted features suggest that she’s nothing more than a ghost. But her pains are far too corporeal to suggest she’s memory alone. Blood still flows sluggishly through thinning veins, a constant chill forcing it away from her extremities. Limbs that used to be primed for running slowly weaken. Perhaps she’s already dead, and this is just a slow decay, the news of her demise still making its way through impossibly ancient limbs. Maybe she’s confusing the past and the future, her body replaying previous deaths she doesn’t know, her mind creating flowers between her ribs in anticipation of the eventual grim end.

The Doctor’s pacing turns to a shuffle, endless machinations unravel into incoherent musings, and eventually she stills, laying for days at a time on her side with nothing to mark the passage of time but imperceptible movements of the starfield that hovers remotely above her through the window. Motivation is ephemeral, and in it’s absence a void of velvet black weighs her down.

When she dreams of Graham, she is once again aware.

He’s on his sofa, and the space is claustrophobic and cavernous, and Grace’s absence screams everywhere and it’s  _ bad _ .

“Heya, Doc,” he murmurs, voice dry and eyes damp. A trembling, awful smile creeps shyly onto his face.

She stands ramrod straight, blinking at him. At length, she nods.

“Graham.”

He looks wretched with sadness as he holds back tears, his eyebrows folding and twisting into a pitying expression. A presentation of the pain she’s caused, delivered to her by her subconscious.

The Doctor crosses the room, for something to do to get away from the look in Graham’s eyes. It doesn’t help, and as she stares out of the window his gaze presses into the back of her neck. It’s quiet for so long that it becomes an accusation- a charge unspoken, beading like sweat on the back of her neck.

“I had to do it,” she says finally, the shaking confession drawn from her by the quiet, “You have to understand, Graham, surely? You can’t have wanted me to let Ryan die? Let Yaz die?”

She doesn’t turn to face him, because it’s easier that way. The silence swallows her words up, and grows and grows behind her until the space is full with the absence of sound, like the space after the last vibrations of a plucked string die away, fading from her chest to her belly to her feet. After an impossibly long time, she hears a resigned sigh and turns to see Graham leaning his head into his hands.

“You warned us,” he murmurs, “Right at the start, you warned us.”

She had done. It hadn’t made a difference. It never could have.

“I said you might not come back the same as you left,” she tilts her head curiously at him, the one she’s cost the most, the one who has the longest list of reasons to resent her. Has she left him better than she found him?

Has she ever left anything other than churned ground and muddy footprints?

“When did you start changing?” he asks, catching her off guard. She blinks and frowns.

“What d’you mean?”

“You didn’t start out this way,” he isn’t angry or accusatory, just a little lost as he gestures to her vaguely, “You must’ve started out… different.”

She lets out a dry little chuckle.

“More and less different than you could possibly imagine,” she offers with a sigh, her hearts filling with a familiar ache, so present and mournful it should spill across her chest as a bloodstain. The barest hint of a flinch shudders across her expression before it’s once again pulled below the glassy surface as she fixes the dream-Graham with an empty expression.

“I started out like everything does. Trusting, innocent. Naive.” She feels betrayal flooding her chest and trying to escape and she suppresses a sob, holding it firmly in her chest, gurgling and thrashing until it quietly drowns. Her voice, when she trusts herself enough to use it again, is just slightly husky as she blinks at Graham. “I’ve lived a very, very, very long time. I’ve seen and done and lost more than you could possibly imagine. You want to know why I’m the way I am?” She’s nettled and it makes her a little sharp edged, a touch deadly. He nods anyway, in spite of the warning signs.

She squares her shoulders.

  
  
“I have to be this way to survive. If I was anything else I would’ve died a long time ago. People who are honest and good don’t last long, in this universe. After a certain point, all you’re left with is people like me.” Her voice doesn’t wobble as she stares down at Graham, as his expression grows unsettled, stung by the poison in her thoughts. “Only the most ruthless get to live this long. Only the coldest and most callous outlive their entire species, outlast infinite wars and survive for thousands of years. So before you feel like asking any more questions, you all ought to ask yourselves if you really want to know the answers.”

Graham’s expression is pinched, disapproving. In spite of everything he still seems to see her as another wayward child he needs to dispense a barrage of advice to. It is of course far too late for her to go back and take his advice, even if she’d wanted to, but he doesn’t know that.

“Ryan and Yaz said you’d changed in their nightmares,” he said slowly, looking deeply troubled as he stood up, “I didn’t believe it… but… it’s you, aint it Doc? This isn’t a dream.”

The Doctor freezes, as surely as if she’d been turned to solid stone. Panic ices over her chest and numbs her tongue, her eyes frantically hovering on Graham. “It’s… it’s my dream,” she whispers, shaking her head slightly, “It’s not real... it’s just a-”

Graham’s expression twists and transforms with hope- it sparks across his features and burns into his expression uncontrollably, even as she tries to fathom how she could possibly really be speaking to him. His eyebrows pull up anxiously as he starts towards her, and she can’t move her legs even an inch as terror claws it’s way up her throat. Her hearts are racing now, betraying her to Graham as still living, solidifying that she’s really talking to him, it’s really Graham, and-

And she has discarded her mask entirely.

She wakes up so suddenly in the dark, quiet cell, that she’s still speaking- trying to apologise to a person halfway across the universe from where she is.

“I’m so sorry-”

The silence yawns heavy in reply.

**Author's Note:**

> HI I'M NOT DEAD, I've had a wacky few months, haven't we all heh heh. New stuff coming soon as I can manage.
> 
> Thank you to FictionPenned for helping me with writing in her style, it was tricky but really enjoyable and I've def learned loads from this!


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